Borders, Bytes, and the Best Interests of the Child: The Second Additional Protocol and Cross-Border Enforcement against Online Child Sexual Exploitation in Nigeria

On 2 June 2025, the Australian Federal Police, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Nigerian authorities announced twenty-two arrests in Nigeria as part of Operation Artemis, a coordinated response to a transnational online child sexual exploitation network linked to multiple teenage suicides in North America and Australia. The operation made a paradox visible: cross-border enforcement against online child sexual exploitation involving Nigeria is operational, yet it proceeds largely outside any treaty-based framework for the disclosure of electronic evidence, the issuance of cross-border subscriber-information requests, the conduct of joint investigations, or the assertion of rights-protective safeguards. This article argues that Nigeria’s accession to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime in 2022, without signing the 2022 Second Additional Protocol on enhanced co-operation and disclosure of electronic evidence (CETS 224), leaves a structural enforcement gap that no amount of bilateral discretion can close. Drawing on a doctrinal and comparative analysis of the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act 2023 and Ghana’s post-accession Cybersecurity Act 2020 framework, the article maps this gap and proposes a focused legislative roadmap for Nigeria to comply with its substantive obligations under the CRC, the OPSC, and the ACRWC. The contribution is to argue that, in the digital environment, the substantive criminalisation of online child sexual exploitation is necessary but not sufficient: in the absence of treaty-based procedural law, the child rights-holder is structurally extra-territorial and the child’s best interests are not operationalised within the procedural architecture governing cross-border electronic evidence.